The principal fascination of this - alas, posthumously released - disc is the opportunity it affords us to hear one of the Violin Concerto's greatest interpreters conducting the work. It is a rare and wonderful experience - Menuhin's reading tender and shrewd, rich in insight - though, ironically, so 'fine' a reading only serves to throw into yet sharper relief the essentially makeshift nature of Beethoven's transcription: the piano trotting unassumingly alongside the orchestra like a dog accompanying its master on some inspiring mountain hike.
In all this, Duchable is a model of obedience, happy to confine his showing-off to the several cadenzas Beethoven wrote for the transcription. (He left none for the concerto proper.) The explosive, proto-Bartokian antics of piano and drum in the transcription's first-movement cadenza are absurdly out of character with the work as it was originally conceived, but great fun.
Beethoven did provide a first-movement cadenza for his B flat Piano Concerto, albeit some years after the work's premiere. True to the mood of amiable eccentricity which pervades the whole CD, Duchable ditches this in favour of an even more anachronistic piece of his own contriving. Happily, neither he nor Menuhin are concerned to 'do' things with the rest of the concerto. Nimble and fresh-toned, the performance assumes no airs; brimful of energy and youthful insouciance, it is happy to dance merrily by.'